We’re three weeks into the new year and by now you’ve probably failed at all your fantastic resolutions. Good. Because now we can focus on doing the things that really excite us, instead of chasing the things we think we ought to do
Paula from Mindnode has some great advice on making 2018 more like your best year:
We need to take apart this pain point until it is crushed into dust. A dust so fine that taking a piece of it seems ridiculously easy, like full on, belly-laughing, ridiculously easy.
Michael Lukiman has an interesting suggestion on Quora:
I’m a neuroscience major, and this is what I think is the most simple, effective heuristic.
Go for what you don’t want.
Go for what you don’t want. Constantly. No excuses. Keep reading, if you’re disciplined enough. It may be what you’re looking for.
Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.
When you do not know what you want, you cannot easily differentiate between the work you need to do and work which you don’t need to do. You end up doing more work than you need to and, as pointed out earlier, you allow yourself insufficient time to recover from your efforts. This will eventually lead to stress and the negative health consequences associated with it.
The Problem With Goals
You wouldn’t know it from browsing the self-help aisle of your local bookstore, but scientists are beginning to question whether focusing too much on goals runs counter to long-term performance and general well-being. In a Harvard Business School report titled “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” a team of researchers from Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania set out to explore the potential downfalls of goal-setting. They found that overemphasizing goals — and especially those that are based on measurable outcomes — often leads to reduced intrinsic motivation, irrational risk-taking, and unethical behavior.
If you want to master multiple habits and stick to them for good, then you need to figure out how to be consistent. How can you do that?
Well, here is one of the most robust findings from psychology research on how to actually follow through on your goals:
Dick Bolles:
When a woman is packing for a trip, she may throw in “this little frock, which can go anywhere.” Likewise, when a man is packing for a trip, he may throw in a dark blue blazer, again because “it can go anywhere.”
This idea, that you have something which could fit into a number of different situations, is probably the best introduction possible to the concept of “transferable skills.”
Briefly stated, this concept holds that your basic skills – whether they be “organizing,” or “analyzing,” or “writing,” or “teaching,” or “planning” – are like that frock or blazer: they can go anywhere.Therefore, you have to decide where you’d be happiest employing your transferable skills, because – believe me – where you’d be happiest is also where you’d be most effective.
This is called “picking a field.” Sounds easy. But I have learned over the past forty plus years that there is no subject where job-hunters and career-changers bog down more, than in figuring out their favorite field; so let me try to cut through the thicket by offering you ten ways to approach this.
If one of the things you want is to improve your presentation skills, why not take a minute to consider Potential Energy:
“Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life,” Ive said. “And the thing with focus is, it’s not this thing you aspire to, or you decide on Monday, ‘You know, I’m going to be focused.’ It is a every minute, ‘Why are we talking about this? This is what we’re working on.’ You can achieve so much when you truly focus.”
He added: “What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you end up saying no to it because you’re focusing on something else.“
Jonathan Ive on what he learned about focus from Steve Jobs.
I have never been good at this, always distracted by another shiny thing but something about the purity of this kind of focus has a deep, visceral appeal. Not sure why.
This is the first in a short series looking at what focus means and how to get more of it.
Thoughts for today:
Focus is less about choosing one thing to concentrate on and much more about saying no to 100 other things.
And it’s not an added extra. If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority.
This’ll only take 30 seconds.
I really love doing this.
January can be a drag and somehow all those irritating jobs which come with living seem worse in the grey cold. So here’s a couple of things you can try because sometimes a spoonful of sugar does make the medicine go down.
Have you ever put off a job – piles of washing up, clearing garden rubbish, vacuuming the car – only to surprise yourself how quick it was, once you started? You know, the jobs where if you’d just got on with it instead of agonising about it, it would be done in half the time?
Try this. Next time you look askance at the washing up pile, say firmly to yourself (or even out loud) It only takes 30 seconds to wash these up. or This’ll only take 30 seconds. Try it. You might surprise yourself.
Of course I know it takes more than 30 seconds but not much more if you plunge in and get on with it. Somehow the reassurance of a quick task makes it easier to plunge in.
And for added sparkle – I love doing this.
Scenario 1 – there you are, bent over the toilet with a brush. Your mouth is grim, your shoulders tight. Your internal dialogue grumbling away in a diatribe about crappy jobs, the cold and the fact that someone else in your house should be doing this. Not pretty is it?
Scenario 2 – there you are, brush in hand, saying to yourself This only takes 30 seconds and scrubbing away, I love doing this. For added benefit you can even smile.
Those jobs will be over in a trice.
